NMEICT

NATIONAL MISSION ON EDUCATION THROUGH

INFORMATION AND COMMUNICATION TECHNOLOGY

INTERACTIVE
MULTIMEDIA
E-CONTENT
HIGH SPEED
CONNECTIVITY
LOW COST
MHRD ACCESS DEVICES
MINISTRY OF
HUMAN RESOURCE DTH
DEVELOPMENT EDUCATIONAL
CHANNELS

inside
what’s

Introduction to NMEICT
NMEICT initiatives

Contact details

To know more about the Mission visit the NMEICT website at http://www.sakshat.ac.in
 01
NATIONAL MISSION
ON EDUCATION
THROUGH ICT
MHRD (NMEICT)
MINISTRY OF
HUMAN RESOURCE
DEVELOPMENT
National Mission on Education through ICT
(NMEICT) is a landmark initiative of the
Ministry of Human Resource Development
(MHRD) to address all the education and
learning related needs of students,
teachers and lifelong learners. In Indian
scenario where there is a vast disparity of
educational facilities available in various
regions across the country, the Mission
envisages to bridge the gap by providing
just- in- time quality educational resources
and teachers 24×7 to learners irrespective of
their social, economic and educational status.
1. Broadband The National Mission on Education through ICT
connectivity to (NMEICT) was launched on February 3, 2009
all colleges and at Tirupati, Andhra Pradesh as a Centrally
Sponsored Scheme to leverage the potential
universities
of ICT in teaching and learning process.
2. Low cost access
& computing devices The three cardinal principles of the Education
Policy viz., access, equity and quality are to be
for students and served through three major components of the
teachers. mission:
3. High quality
e-content generation.
02
Broadband connectivity to all
colleges and universities
Low cost access and computing
devices for students and teachers
High quality e-content generation
There are three guiding philosophies for this
effort – [a] no talent of the country should
be allowed to go waste, [b] all the services
available through the content delivery portal
Sakshat should be free and [c] freely available
material on the web should be used so as
to avoid reinventing the wheel.
The objectives of the mission are:
• Empowering and enabling students
by ensuring equity and access to education
through the use of ICT;
• Connecting over 400 Universities
and 22,000 Colleges all over India through
high-speed data networks;
• Improving faculty quality by using
a unique synchronous training
methodology;
• Ensuring equity by providing access
to expensive equipment to students even in
remote corners through innovative use of ICT;
and
• Making available e-content and
educational videos created by the best
teachers
across all disciplines for UG and PG classes.
The Mission provides an opportunity for all
the teachers and experts in the country to
pool their collective wisdom for the
benefit of every Indian learner and,
thereby, reducing the digital divide and
reaching out hitherto deprived sections of
the society in rural/ under-developed
areas of the country. Under this Mission, a
proper balance between content
generation, research in critical areas
relating to imparting of education and
connectivity for integrating our knowledge
with the advancements in other countries
is being attempted.
It is an endeavor through which MHRD is
synergising the efforts taken by the
educational institutions vis. IITs, UGC, NITs,
CEC, IGNOU and other higher education
institutions in the country to develop world
class content and educational applications.
Senior faculty members from different
universities, research institutes and
institutions of higher learning are
contributing to the development of e-
learning resources, virtual labs, open
source applications etc.
SAKSHAT is envisaged as one stop
education portal to facilitate lifelong
learning of the students, teachers and
those in employments or in pursuit of
knowledge free of cost to them. The
portal is expected to be the main delivery
platform for the contents developed under
the National Mission on Education through
ICT (NMEICT). Sakshat integrates all the
contents developed under the Mission and
also provides Mission related information
 03
and to facilitate public scrutiny, feedback and transparency for the projects
undertaken by the Mission .

Sakshat Website (http://www.sakshat.ac.in)

There are more than hundred forty projects ongoing under the NMEICT ranging from e-
content development, access to e-resources, development of software tools etc. To know
more about these projects visit the Sakshat website at http://www.sakshat.ac.in.
04
MAJOR INITIATIVES
OF THE MISSION

BROADBAND
CONNECTIVITY
TO COLLEGES
AND UNIVERSITIES

Providing connectivity to the colleges, institutions and universities is a key component of

the NMEICT. Around 60% of the Mission budget has been earmarked for the connectivity.
Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited-Mahanagar Telephone Nigam Limited (BSNL-MTNL)
combine have been entrusted with the task of providing connectivity under National
Mission on Education through Information and Communication Technology (NMEICT)
Scheme.
The Mission aims to extend computer infrastructure and connectivity to over 26000+
colleges and 2000 polytechnics in the country including each of the department of 419
universities/deemed universities and institutions of national importance as a part of its
motto to provide connectivity up to the last mile. Up to 400 nodes LAN on average is also
being provided under the Mission. Connectivity to universities and colleges is in progress
and as on date, 400 universities and nearly 26000 colleges in the country have been
connected. For further details visit BSNL- NMEICT portal at http://www.nme.bsnl.co.in/.

Contacts:
University Connectivity : Mr. K RajasekharAdditional GM, SPP Hyderabad ( dgmofc@gmail.com)
College Connectivity : Mr. P Baburaj, DGM, NOC Bangalore ( bpbraj@gmail.com)
 05
LOW COST
ACCESS DEVICE:
AAKASH TABLET

Even the best e-content cannot have a significant impact unless it reaches the vast
majority of learners with ease, as and when they demand it. The Mission has funded the
development of Ultra Low Cost Computing Devices to enable students, wherever they may
be, access to education content. Initially the project was entrusted to IIT Rajasthan, which
worked on the specification, design, tendering and procurement of the first version of the
Aakash tablet. The Minister of Human Resource Development launched Aakash 1 on
October 5, 2011.
06 LOW COST
ACCESS DEVICE:
AAKASH TABLET

contd.

Subsequently Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Bombay took over the project pertaining to
(a) Acquisition and Testing of Low Cost Access-cum-Computing Device and (b) Hardware and
software optimisation of LCAD under the scheme of NMEICT.

The advanced version of low cost tablet called Aakash-2 was launched by the Hon’ble
President of India on the occasion of National Education Day i.e. 11th November, 2012.
As compared to Aakash-1 launched in October 2011, this advanced version had a processor,
which is about 3 times faster, memory twice as large, and capacitive touch screen as
compared to resistive touch screen.
On these upgraded devices, R&D teams at IIT Bombay built a multitude of useful educational
applications and content. Some important applications are:
(i) Interactive lesson building tool ‘ProxyMITY’.
(ii) ‘Clicker’ application which permits quisses to be conducted on-line in class
rooms in real time.
(iii) Standard educational contents in pdf and HTML can now be easily stored and
read on Aakash-2. As a demonstration, some school books available in digital
format from NCERT, and a state board for school students have been ported.
(iv) A ‘Robot-Controller’ as a demonstration of engineering control applications.
(v) Spoken tutorials can be used on Aakash-2.
(vi) Some educational animations have been built, and open source software
tools are being developed and adopted for creating interactive animations to
run on Aakash-2.
(vii) Programming environment which permits students to use these tablets as a
regular computer to write programs in C, C++, and Python.
LOW COST

ACCESS DEVICE: AAKASH TABLET

07
contd.

(viii) The Scilab package has been fully ported on Aakash-2.

(ix) Aadhar biometric authentication has been integrated with Aakash-2.
(x) Linux Operating System has been ported on Aakash, which is being further
optimized.

A total of 1,00,000 tablets were received by IIT Bombay from Datawind. These were
distributed among various remote center colleges across the country.

The Mission is now working towards the development of Aakash IV. To know more
about the Aakash Project visit http://aakashlabs.org/.

Contact: Prof. Deepak B. Phatak, IIT Bombay (dbp@it.iitb.ac.in)

 08 E-CONTENT
DEVELOPMENT
UNDER NMEICT
.

NPTEL is a joint initiative of IITs and IISc funded by this Mission provides e-learning through
online Web and Video based courses in engineering, science and humanities streams.
The Mission of NPTEL is to enhance the quality of engineering education in the country
by providing free online courseware.

922+ courses in Engineering, Technology, Science and Humanities are now available
on the NPTEL portal.

Contact: Prof. Mangala Sunder Krishnan, IIT Madras

(mangal@iitm.ac.in) | (mangala_sunderk@yaho

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-

09
E-CONTENT
DEVELOPMENT
UNDER NMEICT

contd.

Consortium of Educational Communication (CEC) is developing e-content for UG courses.

generation. In phase-I, e-content for 19 UG subjects and in phase-II,for 68 subjects are
being generated by the CEC in collaboration with its media centers.

CEC E-content Portal (www.cec-ugc.ac.in)

Contact: Prof. Rajbir Singh, Director CEC (director.cec@nic.in)

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 10 E-CONTENT
DEVELOPMENT
UNDER NMEICT

contd.

University Grants Commission (UGC) is developing e-content for 77 PG subjects.

e-PG Pathshala (http://www.inflibnet.ac.in/epgp/)

Contact: Dr. Jagdish Arora, Director INFLIBNET (director@inflibnet.ac.in)

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 VIRTUAL LABS
11
To complement the NPTEL e-Content being provided to engineering colleges, Virtual Labs
project has been initiated under NMEICT. This is a joint project of twelve participating
institutes, being nationally coordinated by IIT Delhi. The basic aim of this project is to design
and develop Virtual Lab in various areas of Science and Engineering in order to benefit
maximum number of students. The Virtual Labs essentially comprises a user-friendly
graphical front-end, working in synchronization with a backend, possibly consisting of a
simulation-engine running on a server or actual measurement data or a remotely triggered
experiment.
Virtual Lab Main Page (visit http://iitd.vlab.co.in/index.php# or www.vlab.co.in)

Virtual Lab does not require any additional infrastructural setup for conducting experiments
at user premises. One computer terminal with broadband Internet connectivity is all that is
needed to perform the experiments remotely. Over hundred Virtual Labs are currently ready
for use. These labs were dedicated to the nation on 23 February 2012. Over 50,000
students, (in approximately 150 colleges) have used the Virtual Labs and have provided
user-feedback

Contact: Prof. Ranjan Bose, IIT Delhi (rbose.iitd@gmail.com)

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 12
.

TEACHER’S
TRAINING

Under Talk to a Teacher project sanctioned to IIT, Bombay, A-VIEW developed by Amrita
Vishwa Vidyapeetham is being used as the collaboration tool for the National Teacher
Empowerment Program. Prof. Deepak Phatak, IIT Bombay, leads the National Teacher
Empowerment Program to train thousands of college teachers across the nation. More
than 36, 000 teachers have already been trained under this programme.

To know more about the project visit http://www.co-learn.in.

For more details on A-VIEW visit http://aview.in/.

Contacts:
Prof. Deepak B. Phatak, IIT Bombay ( dbp@it.iitb.ac.in )
Prof. Kannan M. Moudgalya (kannan@iitb.ac.in)
Dr. Kamal Bijlani(for A-View), Amrita University (kamal1008@gmail.com)

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 SPOKEN
13
TUTORIAL
A Spoken Tutorial is a ten minute audio video tutorial on open source software, created to
train our students on important IT topics. Spoken Tutorials are created for self-learning,
using the pedagogical methods developed at IIT Bombay. The spoken part of these
tutorials are dubbed in all Indian languages, to help children who are weak in English. Using
a series of such tutorials, one can learn even a complicated IT topic easily. The main
objective of the Spoken Tutorial project is to improve the employment potential of our
students. At present, there are about 500 spoken tutorials in English and 2,000 dubbed
tutorials in Indian languages.

Spoken Tutorial Website (http://spoken-tutorial.org/)

The Spoken Tutorial team also conducts organised workshops using spoken tutorials. Any
student or a faculty member from any college can conduct SELF workshops, free of cost.
The Spoken Tutorial team at IIT Bombay has trained close to four lakh students through
SELF workshops. These workshops have been conducted in LaTeX, Scilab, PHP, Python,
ORCA, Linux, LibreOffice, Blender, Java, C, C++, GIMP, GeoGebra, OpenFOAM and
Oscad.

The Spoken tutorial team also conducts online tests and give certificates to those who
pass the test free of cost. For further information about this initiative
visit http://spoken-tutorial.org/.

Contact: Prof. Kannan M. Moudgalya (kannan@iitb.ac.in)

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 14
FREE AND OPEN SOURCE
SOFTWARE FOR
EDUCATION
FOSSE
The FOSSE project provides free support on FOSS (free and open source software)
to eliminate the use of commercial/proprietary software in education. The project
activities include:
i) support for Self workshops on FOSS
ii) Textbook Companion- to createdocumentation for FOSS through students,
iii) Lab Migration activity to provide help in shifting from proprietary software based labs
to FOSS.
The FOSSE team
promotes:
(a) Scilab to replaceMatlab
(b) Python, a scripting
language.
(c) Oscad to replace
ORCAD
(d) OpenFOAM, a FOSS alternative
to FLUENT
(e) COIN-OR
for optimisation.

Students and teachers from many colleges across India are participating in, and benefiting
from, these activities. Visit http://fossee.in for more details.

Contact: Prof. Prabhu Ramachandran, IIT Bombay (prabhu@aero.iitb.ac.in)

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 15
E-YANTRA
ROBOTICS IN
HIGHER EDUCATION

e-Yantra is an initiative to incorporate Robotics into engineering education with the

objective of engaging students through exciting hands-on application of math, computer
science, and engineering principles, in order to turn them into engineers who can support a
rapidly growing economy. The goal of e-Yantra is to enable effective embedded systems and
Robotics education across engineering colleges in India, by
• Providing training for teachers and students -- through workshops where participants
are taught basics of embedded systems and programming;
• Engaging teachers and students in hands-on experiments with robots -- through
competitions where participants are given robots to implement a solution; and
• Helping colleges to set-up Robotics labs/clubs – by awarding a basic set of robots
and expert advice to colleges, facilitating setting up of labs, in addition to training their
teachers through workshops.
Visit www.e-yantra.org to know more about the project and access contents

Contact: Prof Kavi Arya, IIT-Bombay (kavi@cse.iitb.ac.in, kavi.arya@gmail.com)

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 16
EDUCATIONAL
RESOURCE PLANNING
(ERP) MISSION

ERP mission with IIT Kanpur as lead institute in collaboration with other partners in this
project AMU (Aligarh), AVV (Kochi), DEI (Agra), IGNOU (Delhi), IIT Roorkee, JMI (Delhi), NIT
Hamirpur, and SMVDU (Jammu), proposes to build, deploy and manage web based
software system for use of Indian academic institutes. IIT Kanpur has developed a learning
management system (LMS) Brihaspati and the other modules of ERP system are being
built around it. Major modules developed are- online admission system, e-portfolio,
project management, general accounting system, payroll generation within a institute,
purchase and inventory management, library automation, online election management
and web hosting management system.
Visit http://202.141.40.218/~brihaspati/edrp_portal to know more about the project.
Contact: Prof. Y.N. Singh, IIT Kanpur (ynsingh@iitk.ac.in)

PEDAGOGY
PROJECT

This project envisages to systematically design and develop learner-centric curricula,

suitable for outcome-based learning for 4 year degree programmes in six major
engineering disciplines. Each curriculum document are primarily meant for students, telling
them what knowledge, skills and attitudes they should be able to demonstrate on
completion of each course, where to find the necessary learning resources (in addition
to approximately 80 pages of in-built course notes) and also providing them with
opportunities for self assessment (around 120 – 125 practice problems / assignments
with solutions). Used innovatively, these documents can promote self and group learning.
Also faculty members, in particular, those who may have to teach such a course for
the first time, are likely to find these documents extremely useful.

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 PEDAGOGY
PROJECT
17
contd.
Pedagogy Project Website
(http://www.ide.iitkgp.ernet.in/Pedagogy1/pedagogy_main.jsp)

Contact: Prof. Anup Kumar Ray, IIT Kharagpur (akray@cet.iitkgp.ernet.in)

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 18
DTH
PROGRAMME
MHRD is poised to launch the most ambitious programme, 50 DTH educational channels’
on 24X7 basis under NME-ICT, to generate and deliver structured education content to
reach homes, the most cost effective way. It aims to achieve composite goals of
ensuring ‘Access, Equity and Excellence’ and bridging the digital divide in higher Education.
The MHRD DTH programme has the potential to be watched by 67% homes in India. Under
this programme Teacher’s/SME’s shall be delivering 8 hours of live lectures a day/channel
and the same will be repeated twice a day to benefit those who miss out the live sessions.
The students can seek answers to their queries instantaneously from the teacher during
the live transmission or asynchronously if they are viewing recorded lectures. The live
telecast will be Multicasted to enable access through other devices like computers,
tablets, and smart phones. The content delivered are to be converted into e-Contents so
that viewers can benefit from watching the content on demand at their convenient time,
place and pace.
MHRD 50 DTH Interactive Channels

GSAT-8

STB 50
TV Delivery Channels
IP Delivery
UNICAST VIDEO ON DEMAND

Servers Hundreds of Subjects

e-Content
developed
Questions
Live

NME
---ICT
Content

CDN
NKN
Live

150 Teaching Ends MULTICAST 50 DTH Channels

1

DTH Structure MoU signed with Prasar Bharti for DTH program

An MOU has been signed between Secretary, HE, MHRD and CEO, Prasar
Bharti on November 19, 2013 to partner the MHRD DTH programme.

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17 19
SWAYAM
INDIA MOOCS

The Ministry of Human Resource Development of Government of India, is panning to

launch its ambitious India MOOCS programme under the Study Webs of Active-
Learning for Young Aspiring Minds (SWAYAM) platform specifically designed to benefit
students from remote area, working professionals as well as college dropouts. Students
will get ‘Verified Certificate’ after successful completion of courses and qualifying
examination.

Some work in this direction has already been done under the NMEICT. IIT Madras has
been offering MOOCs courses since March 2014 and have at present completed/
ongoing around 93 courses. IIT Bombay has launched 6 MOOCs courses. Many other
higher education institutions in the country are proposing to develop MOOCs to deliver
online courses in a mass scale. It is expected that by April 2016 around 2000 MOOCs
courses are to be launched on the SWAYAM platform.

NATONAL
DIGITAL LIBRARY
(NDL)

The National Digital Library (NDL) under the NMEICT has taken up a mammoth task of
collating and harvesting all the digitized and digital content available across the
educational institutions in the country and indexing and hosting them in the National
Digital Library Server to facilitate search and access to open content through a single
window.

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 KEY
CONTACTS
Shri R. Subrahmanyam
Additional Secretary (TE) & Mission subrahyd@gmail.com
Director (NMEICT), MHRD
Shri R. Srinivasan
Director (TE) , MHRD rajusrini.edu@nic.in

Shri Dalip Kapur

Deputy Secretary (TEL) and Nodal dalip.kapur@nic.in
Officer(N- MEICT), MHRD
Shri K.D. Verma
Under Secretary (TEL), MHRD kdverma.edu@nic.in
Shri Pradeep Kaul
Senior Consultant, NMEICT kaulp428@gmail.com
Shri S K Lokhande
Deputy General Manager, EdCIL and pm.nmeict.pi@gmail.com
Project Manager NMEICT

For Sakshat Portal related issues contact: webmaster@sakshat.ac.in

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 www.sakshat.ac.in
MHRD
MINISTRY OF
HUMAN RESOURCE
DEVELOPMENT

NMEICT

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